Patrick Todoroff's Blog, page 27
December 3, 2013
November 22, 2013
Writing advice to myself
1. READ MORE POETRY
You got too many words, dude. This isn’t an essay. You don’t have to explain everything. Most readers are smart enough to fill in the blanks. You don’t have to jerk them around like a dog on a choke-chain making sure they get the point. (nudge, nudge. wink, wink. hint, hint) It’s about the music of language. It’s about economy of prose. No, more then economy, it’s precision. Traction. Poetry exercises those muscles.
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” – Mark Twain
2. MAKE THE STORY STRONG ENOUGH
That it’s banging to come out. Being clever, cute, coy isn’t enough. It’s not sermonizing, regurgitating philosophy, sociological exposition. It’s about people: their struggles, failures, triumphs. Inform, exhort, emote, sure. But beyond that. More than entertainment, titillation, distraction – it’s supposed to transport.
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway
3. EMBRACE THE LEARNING CURVE
Writing stuff that sucks is the only path to writing stuff that doesn’t suck so much. Deal with it. Settle in for the long haul. Like the lottery, you stand a better chance of getting hit by lightning than your first novel becoming an international bestseller translated into 17 different languages turned into a H-wood blockbuster. And while we’re here, there already was a Bill Shakespeare, Steven Pressfield and William Gibson. (Mervyn Peake, Patrick Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie, Dan Abnett, Jeff VanderMeer…) You ain’t him. And the brute fact is you probably don’t have the innate talent to be a literary peer. But that’s no excuse to not be yourself and write the stories God gives you.
“Anything worth doing…”
PS:
Pay for a good cover.
Use Beta readers for substantive feedback.
Pay a Copy Editor
Keep it fun. Write what you want. You want $$? Write porn. But you ain’t, so it needs to be innately satisfying.
November 17, 2013
“And they the rogue hero — “
“- like those great Clinton Westwood westerns.”
From reader Chang An, speaking of Shift Tense: Red Flags. Best review ever. Made my day.
November 8, 2013
A reason to hope
It’s becoming less and less popular these days to identify with Christian faith. Truth be told, I’m less and less interested myself in being an ‘evangelical’ or ‘pentecostal’ or whatever label, but I can’t and won’t deny that 28 years ago Jesus Christ forgave me and changed me. At the end of the day, anything good in my life is from him – my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my friends, my work, my writing… all of it is ultimately from his hands. I’m grateful for the grace, mercy and help he has shown and continues to show me. Life can be random, scary, tragic, but I bear witness you can trust Jesus through it all.
October 31, 2013
Super cool
Posted for no reason other than it’s so awesome. How much you wanna bet he’s homeschooled?
14-year old’s Photo-Manip’ed Self Portraits
October 30, 2013
Soldier Dreams review request
Between sales and promos, hundreds of copies (yes, 300+. Really) of Soldier Dreams have gone out in the the world. If you’ve read it, would you be so kind as to fire off a quick review at Amazon? No guilt, no obligation, but Indie authors rely on those numbers, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks much.
(of course, I could just create a couple dozen false accounts and shill my work, then pimp my services to other writers. Make $$ that way instead…)
October 29, 2013
Halloween: Mocking the Darkness
On the cusp of the customary All Saints Day
The Christ-i-an kinsfolk made mocking display.
These children of light both to tease and deride;
Don darkness, doll down as the sinister side.
In pre-post-er-ous pageants and dress diabolic,
They hand to the damned just one final frolick.
You see with the light of the dawn on the morrow,
The sunrise will swallow such darkness and sorrow.
Well done.
October 28, 2013
The Question
Trawling through the Amazon Kindle shop last night, confronted by a gazillion new five-star titles, I asked myself if I would keep writing if I knew fame wasn’t on the horizon.
Is the story strong enough?
Or is this a Mega-Bucks fantasy, and here I sit at my keyboard punching in ‘lucky numbers, waiting to be struck by lightning?
“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.”
― Pablo Picasso
October 23, 2013
In case you missed this
Combined with Seth Godin’s latest:
Our crystal palace
Thanks to technology, (relative) peace and historic levels of prosperity, we’ve turned our culture into a crystal palace, a gleaming edifice that needs to be perfected and polished more than it is appreciated.
We waste our days whining over slight imperfections (the nuts in first class aren’t warm, the subway isn’t cool enough, the vaccine leaves a bump on our arm for two hours) instead of seeing the modern miracles all around us. That last thing that went horribly wrong, that ruined everything, that led to a spat or tears or reciminations–if you put it on a t-shirt and wore it in public, how would it feel? “My iPhone died in the middle of the 8th inning because my wife didn’t charge it and I couldn’t take a picture of the home run from our box seats!”
Worse, we’re losing our ability to engage with situations that might not have outcomes shiny enough or risk-free enough to belong in the palace. By insulating ourselves from perceived risk, from people and places that might not like us, appreciate us or guarantee us a smooth ride, we spend our day in a prison we’ve built for ourself.
Shiny, but hardly nurturing.
So, we ban things from airplanes not because they are dangerous, but because they frighten us. We avoid writing, or sales calls, or inventing or performing or engaging not because we can’t do it, but because it might not work. We don’t interact with strange ideas, new cuisines or people who share different values because those interactions might make us uncomfortable…
Funny looking tomatoes, people who don’t look like us, interactions where we might not get a yes…
Growth is messy and dangerous. Life is messy and dangerous. When we insist on a guarantee, an ever-increasing standard in everything we measure and a Hollywood ending, we get none of those.
***
The question is: Do I have the courage to do it, the fortitude to persevere?
October 21, 2013
Book Giveaway
Cleaning up the office, I found four ARCs of “Running Black” and 5 of “One Bad Apple”
If you’d like one, (or both) leave a comment with an email so I can get your mailing address.*
*Yes, they’re free. No, I won’t spam you or sell your info. Of course I’d like a read/review, but there’s no strings attached.
